The horrible thing about judges, magistrates, detectives, policemen and other "legal officials" isn't that they're wicked or stupid, 20th Century English luminary G. K. Chesterton once wrote.

It's that they're jaded.

"Strictly they do not see the prisoner in the dock; all they see is the usual man in the usual place," Chesterton wrote. "They do not see the awful court of judgment; they only see their own workshop."

In an essay on jury service, he suggested that something as important as a person's guilt or innocence shouldn't be left to trained people, but rather, their judgments should be infused with "fresh blood and fresh thoughts from the streets."

In other words, common people who bring common sense, empathy and logic not constrained by legal theory, politics, or rote concern over next week's paycheck.

If we want a library catalogued or a solar system discovered, Chesterton wrote, our civilization employs specialists. "When it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing around."

Alfred Dewayne Brown could have used twelve ordinary folks standing around when he was accused of killing a Houston police officer in 2003.

And so could his girlfriend, Ericka Dockery, an alibi witness who was bullied and threatened by a Harris County grand jury into changing her story.

Instead of clear eyes and open minds, they got a group of repeat-grand jurors led by a damn-near professional.

Newly obtained court records show that the foreman, James Koteras, was not only an active Houston police officer and colleague of the murdered officer, he was a grand juror who had served at least six times by 2003. Records show he has served on at least 10 grand juries since 1992.

This is outrageous on many levels. It flies in the face of Texas law, which requires grand juries to represent "a broad cross-section" of the community.

State District Judge Denise Collins, who empaneled Koteras' grand jury, said she usually asks potential grand jurors how many times they've served before approving them, but she doesn't recall whether she did so in Koteras' case. She says if he had told her he'd served six times, she wouldn't have approved him.

"I don't think it's a good idea to keep putting the same people on the grand jury," Collins said this week, but she added, "sometimes, you get desperate."

Several years ago, Collins turned to a new method of choosing grand jurors: she selects them herself from pools of people randomly called for regular jury duty.

As for Brown and Dockery, they didn't get a grand jury willing to protect their rights and serve as a check against overzealous prosecution. They didn't get a grand jury willing to uphold its oath to conduct inquiries with diligence and honesty.

They got a grand jury whose own apparent zeal and jaded view robbed Brown of his only alibi witness and helped deprive Dockery of her freedom.

In Koteras' eyes, Brown may have seemed the usual suspect. A poor black man - and in this case, illiterate - who had socialized with the wrong crowd and whose girlfriend was probably doing what other girlfriends in these cases have done: lying to protect her boyfriend.

As I've reported in a series of columns on the case, Dockery ended up charged with felony perjury for her conflicting statements to the grand jury and locked up at the Harris County jail for four months away from her three children until she agreed to testify against Brown.

Although Koteras' grand jury didn't indict Brown, the one that did also included a cop: a former officer who, according to Chronicle archives, had served as an aide to a former chief. In 2005, Brown was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death.

New evidence unearthed in a detective's garage suggests Brown may have been telling the truth. The trial judge and prosecutors have agreed to a new trial, but the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has sat on the case for more than a year while Brown waits on death row.

The circumstances that led us here are outrageous. But few people familiar with the Texas grand jury process are surprised. It's what happens in a relic of a system - discarded by 48 other states - that lets an elected judge pick a pal, called a commissioner, to pick more pals to guard the gates of due process.

"At some point," says criminal defense attorney Clay Conrad, "the system has just gotten so inbred it's just sort of a parody of what it's supposed to be, which is a citizen panel chosen at semi-random to determine whether the government had enough evidence to go forward. Now it's a panel of cops and retired cops who've done this many times before and it acts as a rubber stamp."

Conrad isn't so jaded that he doesn't want to do something about a dangerously flawed system.

And neither are judges like Collins, who have moved away from the "pick-a-pal" system of grand jury selection. But there are plenty more who cling to it, likely because it's easier, and it's the way it's always been done. A Chronicle story last year reported that 12 of the 21 criminal district courts are still using pick-a-pal to fill their grand juries.

How many of those include ordinary, fair-minded folks? How many are stacked with people like James Koteras?